Violent memories/memory violence

ABSTRACT This review takes up three works that represent recent approaches to the anthropology of memory and affect. Echoing themes in Holocaust literature, a central issue here is the role of violent memory in forging collective identifications and sentiments. Taken together, these volumes suggest a continuing evolution of efforts to theorize the remembrance of violence and the social and bodily practices that mediate its reproduction. In particular, these studies demonstrate the value of ethnography in tracing the social career of violent memory as it is variously projected, suppressed, and transformed in moral communities and across generations.